The Third Session of Academic Forum of Excellence 2024 of the Business School successfully Organized

On the morning of April 10, 2024, the Business School held its third session of Academic Forum of Excellence 2024 at Conference Room 615 in the Main Teaching Building on the Xueyuan South Road Campus of the Central University of Finance and Economics. The lecture featured Associate Professor Jiang Feng from the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom as the guest speaker. More than twenty people, including faculty, doctoral students and master students, participated in this event.

The conference was hosted by Associate Professor Zhang Hongyu, Director of the Department of Organization and Human Resource Management at the Business School. Before the lecture officially began, Zhang Hongyu introduced Mr. Jiang Feng's resume in detail. Jiang Feng is currently an associate professor at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom. He has previously been affiliated with the University of Greenwich (United Kingdom) and the Central University of Finance and Economics (China). His research primarily focuses on cultural and social cognition. He has received research grants from the Royal Society of the United Kingdom and the NSFC. His research findings have been published in leading international journals such as Psychological Science, Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, and Human Resource Management Journal. He currently serves as a member of the editorial board for several journals, including the Journal of Business Research.

The topic of Associate Professor Jiang's lecture was "Man is the measure of all things: Evaluability and overpackaging." This research examines whether shoppers consistently prefer overpackaging from the perspective of consumer/product interaction and highlights the importance of evaluability. Through six studies, using multiple operational definitions of evaluability and packaging, and employing three research designs (scenario experiments, behavioral experiments, and secondary data crawling), and involving participants from both Eastern and Western cultures, a stable effect was revealed: when consumers can easily assess the product, they tend to prefer non-overpackaged products; when the product is difficult to assess, overpackaging may be critical for consumer preferences. This is because packaging and evaluability together influence consumers' inferences about product value. The current study extends the literature on overpackaging and offers a new perspective on influencing consumer preferences.

After the sharing session, the teachers and students who attended the conference engaged in an active discussion on topics such as research models, data analysis, experimental design, and the publication of high-level papers, based on the theme of Associate Professor Jiang's lecture. This further enhanced the depth of academic research exchange.

The “Academic Forum of Excellence” is an academic exchange platform established by the Business School to fulfill its mission of "contributing new knowledge to management.” It focuses on cutting-edge theoretical issues and organizational development challenges in the discipline of business administration and Chinese enterprise management practices. By aggregating cutting-edge thoughts and innovative viewpoints from both domestic and international sources, it seeks to explore Chinese solutions for the social and economic development of China.